AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

In the weeks after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the November election, he posted to Truth Social, quote, ”EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” as he was met by a steady stream of billionaires visiting him at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, some of whom had kept their distance during his first term, like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. Now Bezos and Zuckerberg will join Tesla’s and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, who campaigned with Trump and is the world’s richest man, on the dais Monday during Trump’s inauguration. They’re among the billionaires whose companies pumped a record amount of donations into the 2025 Trump-Vance Presidential Inaugural Committee. Apple, Chevron, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Google, Pfizer, Microsoft and the pharmaceutical lobby also made major donations. Other ultra-millionaires and billionaires attending the inauguration will be those Trump has tapped to serve in his administration alongside Elon Musk.

For more, we’re joined by Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s Capitol Hill lobbyist on ethics, lobbying and campaign finance rules. His new report is titled “Corporations and Billionaires Funnel Millions into Trump Inauguration Committee.”

Craig, welcome back to Democracy Now! Give us a lay of the land. What’s going to happen on Monday? And who’s behind the money for this inauguration? And do we actually know at this point who’s pouring in what?

CRAIG HOLMAN: Well, glad to be here.

What we’re seeing is the Trump inaugural committee shattering all previous records, both in terms of total spending on their inauguration and in the size of donations they’re accepting from billionaires and corporations. First of all, the Trump inaugural committee targeted — set a target of $150 million, which would have broken the previous record of Trump’s $107 million in 2017 to raise and spend on the inauguration. Then it went up. Funds just started flowing in to the coffers. And so, the target went up to $200 million. And just a couple days ago, the target’s increased now to $250 million. We’re talking about a quarter-billion dollars to finance, basically, a party, which is absolutely outrageous. It literally — when you compare it to what other inaugural committees and other presidents have spent on their inaugural festivities, it just puts everybody — it just lays waste to previous norms. Literally, from Reagan to Bush, roughly about $20 million to $30 million was spent on their inaugural activities. Obama bumped it up to about $50 million. Then Trump stepped in with his first one at $107 million and was largely criticized for that. And now we’re talking about $250 million to celebrate the incoming president.

What’s even more concerning than the total amount being spent is the size of the donations that are coming in from corporations and billionaires, all of whom — just about all of whom — want something from the Trump administration. You know, we’re taking a look at cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency industry just came out of the woodwork. I mean, they hardly ever contributed to politics at all, until 2020. And now they’re pumping millions and millions and millions into the inauguration. Ripple —

AMY GOODMAN: And Trump says he’s going to issue an executive order on cryptocurrency on day one.

CRAIG HOLMAN: That’s absolutely right. I mean, when you talk about what does this buy, I mean, you’ve got Ripple, Coinbase, MoonPay, all these cryptocurrency businesses investing heavily in the inauguration, and Trump just recently announced that he’s going to issue an executive order giving priority consideration to cryptocurrency. That means that federal agencies are going to have to take into consideration and figure out how to work with cryptocurrency. This is a dream come true. And, you know, prior to all this money coming in from the cryptocurrency industry, Trump was not a big defender of cryptocurrency. But suddenly he’s in their laps at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: So, maybe I don’t have a big enough imagination, but how do you spend $250 million on a party? I mean, what are the rules and regulations? And where does this money go? It’s not going to all go into Inauguration Day. Who gets it?

CRAIG HOLMAN: You know, we’re not going to know, in the end, where much of that money goes. The rules for regulating inaugural fundraising activities are very, very minimal. There’s only two rules of relevance. One is that a foreign national cannot contribute. Everyone else can. Every corporation, government contractor, billionaire, they can all give as much as they want. There’s no limit on how much they can give. And the second rule is, 90 days after the inauguration, the inaugural committee will release a record of donors of $200 or more to the inauguration. Now, that’s just donors only. The disclosure records will not tell us how the money was spent, and so we’re not going to know that.

There’s also no rules in effect as to how surplus funds are allocated. You know, at $250 million, it isn’t possible that the Trump inaugural committee can spend that much. Even back in 2017 with the $107 million, they had a surplus with that. And I had written letters twice to the inaugural committee asking what’s going on with the surplus funds, and never got an answer. They don’t have to answer me. They don’t have to tell us what they’re going to do with the funds. The stories we’re hearing in the press at this point is that some of the surplus may go to Trump’s super PAC. Some may go to the presidential library. But in the end, we really don’t know. If they don’t want to tell us where that money goes, we’re not going to know.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to ask about the inaugural fund chairs. You’ve got the well-known millionaire, former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, who’s Trump’s pick to be the head of the Small Business Administration, and a man who’s very much has been in the news over the last weeks, the real estate investor Steve Witkoff, who is the one who pressured Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire deal?

CRAIG HOLMAN: Yes. What we’re seeing is the Trump nominees for all the various Cabinet posts and senior positions tend to be his biggest donors. We see, like, Linda McMahon and Lutnick, who were the head of the transition team, are being appointed as secretaries, Cabinet officials. Elon Musk has worked himself into an advisory role, but Trump is even giving him an office in the White House. And by the way, I want to emphasize, in the advisory capacity, then, Elon Musk no longer has to comply with strict ethics rules. So, even though he has to disclose any conflicts of interest, he does not have to recuse himself from serious conflicts of interest or divest, which is an ideal —

AMY GOODMAN: Because?

CRAIG HOLMAN: Ideal position for Elon Musk. I mean, that way, he gets to hang on to his money.

AMY GOODMAN: Because, Craig? Why doesn’t he have to reveal? You are talking about him and Vivek Ramaswamy heading up DOGE, right? The office on government efficiency. But it’s not actually a real government office?

CRAIG HOLMAN: The code of ethics for an advisory position is very minimal. Now, Elon Musk does have to disclose his conflicts of interest, but he doesn’t have to work out an arrangement to recuse himself from those conflicts, if he can justify that the conflicts affect more than just him. If it goes beyond him to affect the whole industry, like cryptocurrency, then it’s fine. He doesn’t have to recuse himself. He doesn’t have to divest. So, it’s —

AMY GOODMAN: We just have a few minutes, and I want to get to a number of issues. One is, you have proposed dealing with abuses of inaugural fund, you know, where that hundreds of millions of dollars will actually go, with a legislative bill called the Inaugural Fund Integrity Act. Twenty seconds on what that is?

CRAIG HOLMAN: That’s right. It was just — the bill was just introduced yesterday by Representative Scanlon in the House. And I am working to try to find a Senate companion for the bill, as well. That bill would actually bring together some reasonable — reasonable regulations on the inaugural financing.

You know, inaugural financing has always been sort of an unregulated field, largely because no one really suspected it would become a playground for billionaires and government contractors to try to curry favor. What we’re seeing this time around, at $250 million, with all these special interests giving a million dollars or more, that this is exactly what’s going on. They are buying access, and with the hope of buying influence and public policies and government contracts. So, now that we’re seeing the abuses, that are just phenomenal this time around, I’m hoping this legislation stands a good chance.

It would set up, first of all, a ban on corporations making contributions, and that includes government contractors. It would set a contribution limit on individuals at $50,000, which is perfectly reasonable, even though, in my mind, kind of high, but at least it’s better than a million dollars or $5 million that we’re seeing now. And it would require full disclosure of both expenditures and contributions to the inaugural committee, and it would set up rules as to how the surplus funds are dispensed. Surplus funds would have to be given to a legitimate nonprofit organization and cannot be used for personal benefit.

So it’s legislation that’s needed. It’s been introduced several times and hasn’t gone very far, but with this record-breaking Trump inauguration, I suspect we’re going to get — we’re going to get some legs behind this legislation this time around. I mean, this inauguration and the massive donors, you know, the —

AMY GOODMAN: Twenty seconds.

CRAIG HOLMAN: The executive order for the cryptocurrency industry just, you know, reflects that they are buying influence with the Trump administration, so we’re going to see scandal after scandal follow this inauguration. And reform often comes on the heels of scandal.

AMY GOODMAN: Craig Holman, I want to thank you for being with us. We’ll continue to follow this story. Public Citizen’s Capitol Hill lobbyist on ethics, lobbying and campaign finance rules. We’ll into your report, “Corporations and Billionaires Funnel Millions into Trump Inauguration Committee.”

Next up, President Biden has made history granting thousands of commutations, pardons, clemency. Will he grant clemency to the Native American leader Leonard Peltier, in prison for half a century? Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Falling” by Julee Cruise from the Twin Peaks soundtrack. Iconoclastic director, transcendental meditation evangelist David Lynch passed away Thursday at the age of 78.